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Author: Kaysen, Susanna

Autobiography: general

Published on 23 January 2025 by Little, Brown Book Group (Virago Press Ltd) in the United Kingdom as part of ‘the VMC’ series.

Paperback | 192 pages
126 x 197 x 15 | 158g

Crazy isn’t being broken or swallowing a dark secret. It’s you or me amplified. If you ever told a lie and enjoyed it. If you ever wished you could be a child forever.

In 1967, after a session with a psychiatrist she’d never seen before, eighteen-year-old Susanna Kaysen was put in a taxi and sent to McLean Hospital to be treated for depression. She spent most of the next two years on the ward for teenage girls in a psychiatric hospital renowned for its famous clientele – Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, James Taylor and Ray Charles. Unflinchingly honest and darkly funny, this bestselling memoir is a sharply vivid portrait of Susanna’s fellow patients, the kaleidoscopically shifting world of the late sixties, and how sometimes the only way to stay sane is to go a little crazy.

‘Girl, Interrupted is a beautiful, complex story that truly led the way on opening up a new, brave, nuanced approach to talking about women’s mental health. An intense and personal story that taps into a universal truth about how the world responds to complicated young women’ SCARLETT CURTIS ‘Poignant, honest and triumphantly funny . . . A compelling and heartbreaking story’ NEW YORK TIMES’Not since Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar has a personal account of life in a mental hospital achieved as much popularity and acclaim’ TIME’A cool, elegant and unexpectedly funny memoir’ SUNDAY TIMES ‘Memorable and stirring’ VOGUE